The new issue of Vanity Fair has an interesting article about William Manchester and his authorized account the JFK assassination, The Death of a President. The main focus is on Manchester's ordeal writing the book and bringing it to publication, on his eventually difficult relationship with Jackie Kennedy, who felt that it captured too much that was too personal. (Read the article to learn why this important book is still out of print.) But it's the following passage that chilled my blood:
Manchester also discovered that Dallas "had become the Mecca for medicine-show evangelists ... the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry Societies, and the headquarters of [ultra-conservative oil billionaire] H. L. Hunt and his activities."
"In that third year of the Kennedy presidency," Manchester wrote, "a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened.
Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas....Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars." A retired major general ran the American flag upside down [warning: link to 9/12 idiots], deriding it as "the Democrat flag." A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing "this man is Wanted" for—among other things—"turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations" and appointing "anti-Christians ... aliens and known Communists" to federal offices. And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, "Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today."
Manchester discovered that in a wealthy Dallas suburb, when told that President Kennedy had been murdered in their city, the students in a fourth-grade class burst into applause. For Manchester, who revered Kennedy, such responses, encountered throughout Dallas, were deeply offensive and would influence the book he was about to write.
Manchester also learned that in 1963 there had been 110 murders in Dallas—"Big D"—in what he described as the city’s "dark streak of violence." "Texas led the United States in homicide, and Big D led Texas," he wrote. He would come to believe that Dallas’s charged political climate had been a factor in the assassination, helping to further unhinge the already unstable Lee Harvey Oswald.
He also discovered that Kennedy had been warned not to make the trip. "Evangelist Billy Graham had attempted to reach Kennedy ... about his own foreboding. The Dallas mood was no secret," he wrote. And Senator William Fulbright, the liberal senator from Arkansas, had pleaded with Kennedy: "Dallas is a very dangerous place. I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go."
The article draws no connection to the hateful attacks on our current President, and this passage is buried exactly in the middle of the 17 pages of the magazine devoted to this story. The crucial account itself, quoted here, was written by Manchester in the 1960's, so it's up to us to figure out what to make of the fact that today's right-wingers are described to a T in these 42-year-old passages.
I am not particularly prone to Obama assassination fears, which rank way down on my list of urgent political topics. So what are my reasons for bringing this to the attention of the Daily Kos community?
- I am in my mid-30's and not completely ignorant of 20th century American history. But it was a complete revelation to me that Dallas, Texas, was in 1963 so widely known as a hotbed of hateful paranoia that evangelists and Arkansans would consider it dangerous. I had no idea that the tone of right-wing lunacy was then as potent as it is now, no idea that there was a cultural equivalent then of the gun-toting, Glenn-Beck-believing Un-Patriots of today.
- The comparison should be put in people's faces today. Sometimes it takes something that transcends our momentary passions to remind us of what is good and evil in our national life and national character. I feel that if this passage were posted on giant placards in every town square, it would be less acceptable for the right-wing fringe to indulge their violent fantasies and rhetoric. At some point, we are going to wake up instructed by our "better angels" and universally recognize the monstrous demogoguery we're facing for what it is. I'd rather it be because of shame and reason than because of violence.
- It is a reminder that change worth bringing has always aroused some very loud and ugly voices in this country. FDR would never have accomplished a small part of his achievements if he hadn't steamrolled right over the people who made him say, "They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred!" We need this reminder to rally our troops and to push our President to the boldness history requires of him. The politics of progress require us, at present, to FIGHT and welcome all the crazy denunciations that will fall on our heads.